MyDD Not Disbursing Funds To Candidates

Lost in the current controversy over MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong's apparent belief in astrology, are other reports which could cause some to question if it's a good idea to have an individual who ran afoul of the SEC minding on line contributions for political candidates.

As The Hill reported on June 15th, Daily Kos has transferred administration of Blog PAC over to MyDD. MyDD also indicated its decision to no longer distribute funds from the PAC to political candidates, but to use them, in some manner, to support bloggers themselves.

BlogPAC, a liberal political action committee started in 2004 by the Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and several others bloggers, is under new management.

Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, who write for the liberal blog MyDD.com, took control of BlogPAC earlier this month. It will no longer operate as a traditional PAC, raising money to support candidates and participate in elections, Bowers said in a statement on the website.

“Under our management, the mission of BlogPac will be primarily to defend the netroots and improve the quality of online activism,” Bowers wrote. “What we do not have is a formal entity to defend and enhance the political activity of the progressive blogosphere and progressive netroots.”

Bowers told The Hill that BlogPAC does not need to steer money to candidates because ActBlue, a website that lets bloggers and readers contribute directly to candidates, has helped raise more than $5 million for Democrats since 2004.

Given some previous statements and the current controversy surrounding Amrstrong, it's fair to look at certain facts. While Stoller and Bowers are officially administering the PAC, one has to wonder if they don't actually work for Armstrong. As pointed out here, someone is being paid by someone at MyDD.

Here Chris Bowers at MyDD acknowledges some paid arrangement involving the SEIU.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that while I am not actually paid by SEIU, the only client I am currently paid to consult for is SEIU.

And here, I pointed out that the SEIU has been paying Political Technologies, LLC, presumably an Amrstrong company. Such an arrangement, between Armstrong and Bowers, assuming it exists, in a sense, might make the increasingly controversial Armstrong Bower's boss while he's administering Blog PAC.

Oh - and here's a link to where SEIU paid Political Technologists LLC almost $162,000 in 2005. Enter - political technologies LLC And either there's a redundancy, or they were paying two equal payouts each month.

There is also ample evidence on the Internet that, whether illegal, or not, Armstrong's judgment, both political and financial, is certainly subject to question. In this post, poster MyDDdotcom indicates he also posted on stocks as 426figures.

Yep, used to post on RB as 426figures, good to be here, thanks... SYCD looks like a good buy at .11, if CMIX or TGHI works out to form I'll load up again there... that Pokemon run thing sure was a fun one:)

Following the trail of 426figures leads one to this post, which claims to display a variety of screen names for MyDD's Jerome Armstrong.

could get Jerome B. Armstrong (426figures, four2sixfigures, 426, im426, jeromejackson, mydddotcom etc...to start a message board. He does specialize in Shells and RM's over on Ihub,SI or RB. We all know how involved he was on the early boards For SCII, I think he even started the RB thread. Not sure what his new alias is now he does change them alot

Evidence of Armstrong's bad judgment might be seen here on this board, upon which a poster, 426figures, consistently touts another stock, that of InvestAmerica, Inc (INVT).

As for my realistic opinion. I like to think big and trade wise. I'm already up 300%, so I've sold a third of my position and have 20k of free shares that I'll ride this with, as far as it will take me. There's no way this will ever be in the .teens or .twenties again, ... Grond(sic) floor, the company is excited, worlds of possibilities in this emerging, very profitible field.
Skies the limit! Just a matter of finding new, higher, floors now!

The issue of judgment comes into play if you glance at this from Fool.com, where that precise stock is featured in an article Following the Stupid Money.

Well, it goes to figure that if there is some smart money out there in the investing universe, there must also be some stupid money.

An example: InvestAmerica (OTCBB: INVT). Here is the company's profile:

... Let me translate: We're not doing anything. We're looking for something to do, and we're interested in merging with a company that would like to become public the easy way.

Current market cap? $148 million dollars. For no revenues, and $500,000 in the bank. Look, I don't want to cast aspersions on the company, but starting up a business is hard, even without the added hassle of dealing with public shareholders. More than 80% of all new companies fail within the first two years. The people who have invested in this company have given themselves, mathematically, a 20% chance of even getting their money back. On what? A company with no business plan whatsoever. We often talk about the illogic of playing the lottery as an investment (average return -50%), but these people would be better off if they DID put their money into lottery tickets.

Without alleging any illegality, or malfeasance, which I am not - given Armstrong's display of bad judgment in both political candidates and stocks, on top of his trouble with the SEC, it seems fair to at least broach the question: will the decision to turn Blog PAC over to MyDD end up helping blogs, or being a classic example of how a fool and his money can be soon parted?

Of course, assuming one thinks most liberals are fools to begin with, I suppose you could make the argument that its stupid money right from the start.

You can see Blog PAC's FEC filings here. They've already had more than one request for additional information as regards itemized expenditures and affiliated organizations or relationships. The pdf's aren't linkable, but are listed as Requests for Additional Information at link above.

Update: Just like me to be off researching a story while everyone's having so much fun!

Also, Instapundit has a round up of all the related coverage. Or should I say snark?

Update: If you look at the BlogPAC disclosure records, you'll see that from Jan - Mar of 2005 - their only disbursements were to another blogger / consultant - Bob Bingham - from the Swing State Blog. According to slate, he was a one time employee of Armstrong, as well as a leading force behind BlogPAC. Interesting. They've been collecting money on line and paying it to ... themselves for consulting?? I don't know. But those filings could prove interesting, either now, or in the future.

Comments

[Matt Stoller]

Bob was paid to operate the web site Thereisnocrisis.com, the successful campaign to stop Bush's privatization of Social Security. He did a great job.

[WWB]

So far as I know and has been reported, the BlogPAC trusteeship is currently Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller. Jerome stepped away from all day-to-day management of MyDD last fall when he was working for Sherrod Brown (this step was taken at least partly due to my reporting at Hotline's Blogometer). Markos also stepped away around that time, and for most of '05 I believe the organization was mostly dormant.

Early this year, the trusteeship was removed from Moulitsas and Armstrong (the latter because of his consultancy for Brown and others). So I believe that question is N/A. However, it certainly does remain an open question re: how much involvement Armstrong has over the site he founded, wrote for while consulting and apparently still maintains.

At the time I was covering this, I still thought it was little funny, but it was also more or less explainable as a bunch of friends working on the same project. I still think that's basically the case, but he question still remains as to how much Markos, Jerome, Chris, Matt and others share duties. This goes for BlogPAC and the Advertising Liberally network, which I have generally understood to be Bowers' domain.

One change to make -- it's Bob Brigham, not Bingham.

[WWB]

Hey, there's Matt now. I'm sure he could explain more of this. But I wouldn't be surprised if there are aspects of this that Jerome has kept from him, and others.

[Dan]

My only concern is that as blogs become more sophisticated, particularly as regards fund raising and distribution, it's best if it is as open as possible and things are done ethically. I was careful not to state that they aren't right now in this particular regard, while also pointing out the need for some scrutiny. And my concerns go for the right and left side of the blogging community.

Chris Bowers posted that he was consulting for a trade union, who he is actually working for, he did not say. The door to speculation was opened from the way things are being done, IMO, and not being pried open for some ideological reasons.

And as regards Armstrong, apparently individuals are being encouraged not to comment. That's hardly the openess most bloggers profess to embrace.

[Dan]

Also, I'd add that if Brigham was being paid a thousand dollars a week to run a blog, or whatever he was paid, is that a market value wage? If one is going to solicit donations, there should be some accountability for managing expenditures responsibly. Perhaps you have a mechanism in place of which I'm unaware. And ultimately, it's to the people you wish to solicit that such answers matter most. I'm simply raising what I think are legitimate questions.

[antiwar]

Predictably, all this is being used to smear the left, but I hope that people on the right understand that Kos, Jerome and their henchmen have no ideology. The background that's being exposed merely confirms what people who are against the war in Iraq, for choice or for gay rights have known for a long time. These guys have merely brought the kind of stock touting, thread bullying tactics they used to bilk stock market suckers into the political arena to hustle well-meaning, if naive, political progressives.

There are fairly sizeable blog communities on the left made up of people who have been purged by Kos, Armando, DHinMI and their syncophants. Criticize Joe Lieberman on Daily Kos, and you'll win nothing but plaudits. Criticize Harry Reid, who's not much different when it comes to voting record, and the Kosmandos be after you with knives. I'm not talking about the average reader or even active participant. I mean a small group of "troll hunters" who viciously go after anyone on the left who strays from the Kos line. The average RedStater would get better treatment.

Kos has jumped the shark. Just look at his yearly Sitemeter stats. Visitors are down by more than 1/3 from October while visitors on newer sites like firedoglake--that are picking up dKos refugees--are way up. Even the Newsweek article quotes 600,000 "hits" a day (the authors are idiots about the Web) when visitors have been averaging below 500,000 and heading toward 400,000.

I hate to see some good lefty bloggers like Glenn Greenwald dragged down along with Kos. Some have the good sense to distance themselves, but Kos and his loyalists are ready to go after them. The problem is that this time around, there are just too many to shut them all up.

[WWB]

Dan, I agree. These are good questions. They matter more, I think, if you care about Democratic politics (and I suspect you don't so much). It will probably make it harder for bloggers associated with the netroots to get jobs in Dem circles. Republicans already keep a bit of distance between themselves and the bloggers, and in the media (where bloggers also seem to get jobs) this has no bearing (much less than, say, Ben Domenech).

Antiwar, expect the pageviews at dKos to go up again as the election draws nearer, and go down again thereafter. I do expect dKos will eventually slip from its perch at the top of the blogosphere, but I'd be pretty surprised if it happened this quickly. Was Yearly Kos the beginning of the end?

[American Daughter]

We believe this is a ruckus created by the Clinton machine to weaken the Mark Warner campaign, or at least to discredit Armstrong. It is follow on to the Virginia primary, which if you had seen it up close and personal, would be very suggestive.

Our reasoning is laid out in an article titled "Blogosphere Kerfuffle."

[Chris Bowers]

Because of my experience online and because of my background as a union organizer, Jerome hired me in February, 2005 to help consult for SEIU Local 73 in Chicago. I helped work on the Internet side of two campaigns from February until July of 2005. In total, I was paid $6,000 for doing so by Political Technologies. Since then, I have done no paid consulting for Jerome's company, or for any unions.

Matt is currently the President of BlogPac, and I am the Treasurer. Markos and Jerome have no legal affiliation with BlogPac, and Matt and I do not consult with them on our projects. Matt and I have decided that BlogPac will no longer be used to help electoral campaigns, because ActBlue does such a bangup job of allowing anyone to do that on behalf of Democrats. For June, our only project was the BlogPac Netroots Survey (part one and part two). This will be reflected on our July FEC report.

As someone who has never made more than $40K in a single year, I am suprised at the detail with which my employment records have been spread around online, especially by people who have my email addresses and simply could have asked me.